'Repeat After Me's' high energy is touching

By JOE ADCOCK, P-I THEATER CRITIC

Published
10:00 pm PDT, Friday, November 2, 2007

Messy and precise, sorrowful and exultant, wild and contemplative: These are opposites, right? Well not according to Hand2Mouth Theatre of Portland. Their thrilling show "Repeat After Me" traces the connections between apparent opposites. A recurring frenzy/exhaustion, enthusiasm/shame, illusion/disillusion rhythm follows a cause/effect beat.

"Repeat After Me" is karaoke in the service of compassion. The seven-member cast works with a soundtrack of popular music, much of it from the country charts. Tunes, some celebrated some obscure, take the pulse of the past 40 years of American emotion. The emphasis is on working-class sensibilities. Sometimes the effect is satirical. But usually it is tender. In either case, there's an underlying warmth.

Moments of strident patriotism and belligerent militarism have a desperate quality. There's plenty of flag-waving. One of the performers, Jeb Pearson, sings the John Prine ballad "Sam Stone." It's about a veteran broken by a heroin addiction started up in Vietnam. The effect is excruciatingly poignant.

A party song about out-of-control pranks at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq quickly slips from silly to dismaying. In a story song, sober pride in being a father and a conscientious family man collides with the delirium of being a party animal. Moments of fanatical patriotism slip into angry frustration.

And yet "Repeat After Me" is in no way a downer. A beach party sequence is giddy. It looks as if date rape is narrowly averted. But, basically, the scene is a good-hearted celebration of erotic high spirits. A Vegas sequence is not exactly glamorous. A "Boot Scootin' Boogie" number is not exactly a shout out for Brooks & Dunn.

But the show's high energy is touching. The yearning for transcendence is palpable. A recurrent anthem is "Forever Young." It's as if America's recurrent mess-ups, tragic though they be, are a kind of pathetic immaturity -- ghastly in the hands of the arrogantly powerful but pretty harmless among the ordinary people whose lives reflect and are reflected by pop music.

During "Repeat After Me," many balloons -- red, white and blue -- are pricked. The noise can be startling. But the idea of deflated delusions is a relief.